Read Circles on the Water Online
Authors: Marge Piercy
Each of the following poems issues from a card in the Tarot deck. The Tarot cards have existed in some form since the Renaissance, and always they have carried a heretical meaning in their rich freight of the common symbols of Western culture, Western literature. I first ran across them many, many years ago when I was passionately involved in Yeats, his poetry, his ideas, the people whose work touched his own, including the creators of the deck I use still, Pamela Colman Smith and Arthur Edward Waite.
In the late sixties I began to handle the cards again. Whether using them in a mixture of divination and covert advice-giving to friends or meditating on individual cards, I found they stirred my imagination and often provided imagery that would enter my work. For me they are rich and disturbing and provoke many levels of responding, feeling and knowing.
These eleven poems are the cards of a Tarot reading. As in any reading, the context of the total set influences the way individual cards are interpreted. Every reading of the cards implies judgments—a valuing of some attributes and activities and a condemning of others. Every reading has underlying it a clumping of ideas about self and others, about good and bad, about female and male, about what winning and losing mean.
This reading is political; the values are different from the more conventional ways of reading the deck. But they’re not any more present than in the ways that say the Nine of Cups is a fortunate card because it means you get a lot of “goods” to have and hold.
We must break through the old roles to encounter our own meanings in the symbols we experience in dreams, in songs, in vision, in meditation. Some of these symbols are much older than capitalism, and some contain knowledge we must recover; but we receive all through a filter that has aligned the stuff of our dreams, our visions, our poetry by values not our own.
What we use we must remake. Then only we are not playing with dead dreams but seeing ourselves more clearly, and more clearly becoming. The defeated in history lose their names, their
goddesses, their language, their culture. The myths we imagine we are living (old westerns, true romances) shape our choices.
Some of the most significant myths are those of history. Here I am reconciling myself to my own history and trying to bring my sense of that history to you. I experience current media and official formulas about the recent past as an assault, a robbery. At the same time, in my third movement I go through a sense of ghostly recurrence, of centrifugal forces and schisms that unnecessarily rack and divide. Each succeeding movement has been for me a qualitative change in depth of personal involvement, in perception of the world, in what I want; the totality of the struggle in the women’s movement has shaken me and altered me past the level of conscious mind. But trying to write our own history is of common concern, for if we cannot learn from that recent past and each other, we become our worst rhetoric. Whatever is not an energy source is an energy sink.
1973
This is my deck I unwrap, and this is the card for me.
I will in any house find quickly like my sister the cat
the most comfortable chair, snug out of drafts.
Empathy flows through my fingers: I need to touch.
I am at home in that landscape of unkempt garden,
mulch and manure, thorny blackberry and sunflower and grape coiling,
tomato plants mad with fecundity bending their stakes,
asparagus waving fronds in the wind.
Even in a New York apartment with dirt
bought in bags like chocolate candy, I raised herbs.
I prefer species roses rough as weeds
with a strong scent, simple flowers and hips good for jam.
I like wine’s fine weather on my palate.
I can sink into my body like a mole
and be lost in the tunnels of the nerves, suckling.
I want to push roots deep in my hillside and sag with ripeness,
an apple tree sprawling with fruit.
The music sacred to me speaks through drums
directly on my pulses, into the chambers of my brain.
Yet this knowing is hard and bloody, that should dance through us.
Too many have been murdered from the sky,
the soil has been tainted and blows away and the water stinks.
I want to grow into the benign mother with open hands
healing and fertile but must spay myself to serve,
sear off one breast like an Amazon to fight
for even the apple that shines in the hand
is secretly waxed and full of poison.
The orange is dyed with the blood of the picker.
The peach plucked green tastes of paper dollars,
run off by the emperor to finance his wars.
How often my own words set my teeth on edge
sour and hard, tearing the roof of my mouth.
What I do well and what I must do make war in my chest.
Through other women sometimes I can touch
pruned selves, smothered wishes, small wet cries that vanished
and think how all together we make up one good strong woman.
Still to get strength
for the things we have to do that frighten me
I go and dig my hands into the ground.
All my life I have been a prisoner under the Tower.
Some say that grey lid is the sky. Our streets are hammers.
Grey is the water we drink, grey the face I cannot love in the mirror,
grey is the money we lack, the itch and scratch of skins rubbing.
Grey is the color of work without purpose or end,
and the cancer of hopelessness creeping through the gut.
In my bones are calcium rings of the body’s hunger
from grey bread that turns to ash in the belly.
In my brain schooled lies rot into self-hatred: and who
can I hate in the cattle car subway
like the neighbor whose elbow cracks my ribs?
The Tower of Baffle speaks bureaucratic and psychologese,
multiple choice, one in vain, one insane, one trite as rain.
Military bumblewords, pre-emptive stroke, mind and body count and strategic omelet.
Above in the sun live those who own, making our weather with their refuse.
Their neon signs instruct us through the permanent smog.
Rockefellers, Mellons and Du Ponts, you Fords and Houghtons,
who are you to own my eyes? Who gave me to be your serf?
I have never seen your faces but your walls surround me.
With the loot of the world you built these stinking cities as monuments.
The Tower is ugly as General Motors, as public housing,
as the twin piles of the World Trade Center,
tallest, biggest and menacing as fins on an automobile,
horns on a Minotaur programmed to kill.
The weight of the Tower is in me. Can I ever straighten?
You trained me in passivity to lay for you like a doped hen.
You bounce your gabble off the sky to pierce our brains.
Your loudspeakers from every television and classroom
and your transistors grafted onto my nerves at birth
shout you are impregnable and righteous forever.
But any structure can be overthrown.
London Bridge with the woman built into the base
as sacrifice is coming down.
The Tower will fall if we pull together.
Then the Tower reversed, symbol of tyranny and oppression,
shall not be set upright.
We are not turning things over merely
but we will lay the Tower on its side.
We will make it a communal longhouse.
Not fat, not gross, just well fed and hefty he sits before what’s his,
the owner, the ultimate consumer, the overlord.
No human kidneys can pump nine cups of wine through
but that’s missing the point of having: possession is power
whether he owns apartment houses or herds of prime beef
or women’s soft hands or the phone lines or the right to kill
or pieces of paper that channel men’s working hours.
He is not malcontent. He has that huge high-colored
healthy face you see on executives just massaged.
He eats lobster, he drinks aged scotch, he buys pretty women.
He buys men who write about how he is a servant of circumstance.
He buys armies to shoot peasants squatting on his oil.
He is your landlord: he shuts off the heat and the light and the water,
he shuts off air, he shuts off growth, he shuts off your sex.
He buys men who know geology for him, he buys men who count stars,
he buys women who paint their best dreams all over his ceiling.
He buys giants who grow for him and dwarfs who shrink
and he eats them all, he eats, he eats well,
he eats and twenty Bolivians starve, a division of labor.
You are in his cup, you float like an icecube, you sink like an onion.
Guilt is the training of his servants that we may serve harder.
His priests sell us penance for his guilt,
his psychiatrists whip our parents through our cold bowels,
his explainers drone of human nature and the human condition.
He is squatting on our heads laughing. He belches with health.
He feels so very good he rewards us with TV sets
which depict each one of us his servants sitting
just as fat and proud and ready to stomp
in front of the pile of tin cans we call our castle.
On the six o’clock news the Enemy attacks.
Then our landlord spares no expense to defend us,
for the hungry out there want to steal our TV sets.
He raises our taxes one hundred per cent
and sells us weapons and sends us out to fight.
We fight and we die, for god, country and the dollar
and then we come back home
and he raises the rent.
I was a weapon. I brandished myself, I was used in the air.
We rushed in waves at the Tower and were hurtled back.
Because we were right, should we not win?
When you know that in the foreign and domestic colonies
people are dying of hunger, of napalm, of gas, of rats, of racism,
dying and dying each death is a drop of blood falling
all night on your forehead, each death is a nail tapped in.
It is participation in murder
to sit one moment longer at the key punch.
It is guilt by association to raise your hand in class.
It is being an accomplice to take a job in the lab.
Buying a car, you pay for a fragmentation bomb.
If you are not fighting, are you not supporting?
If you saw the children starving in Brazil, would you wait
the five minutes that is five more bodies bloating?
If you saw the children burning in the bombed villages of Laos
would you have another coffee and eat the jelly doughnut?
If you saw the inside of that prison, would you switch channels?
So run at the barricade and throw back the canister of gas.
So take the club in your face and keep on slugging.
We must win, we must win for everybody so we cannot,
we can never pause, we have no time to look, we cannot breathe.
Run, keep running, don’t look sideways.
The blood is raining down all the time, how can we rest?
How can we pause to think, how can we argue with you,
how can we pause to reason and win you over?
Conscience is the sword we wield,
conscience is the sword that runs us through.
Bound, blinded, stymied, with bared blades for walls
and alone, my eyes and mouth filled up with dark.
We had grown used to a Movement, that sense of thaw,
things breaking loose and openings and doors pushed by the wind,
spring after the end of the Age of Ice.
Used to feeling connected, used to sisters and brothers,
used to an us that felt bigger and warmer than them.
We grew like weeds in sand.
We lusted after brave loud crashing rhetoric
and threw small gains away because they made no show.
We clashed on each other, we chopped, we never hit harder
than when we were axing a comrade two feet to the right.
Factions charred our energies. Repression ground us.
Some they bought off, some they shot down,
some they locked in their prisons or their asylums,
some they wasted with their heroin pumped in the streets,
some they have broken in hospitals, some they have gagged,
some they tormented till we rushed into death screaming rage,
some they tricked into despair so we stood impaled:
no longer could we imagine winning.
Despair is the worst betrayal, the coldest seduction:
to believe at last that the enemy will prevail.
Hush, the heart’s drum, my life, my breath.
There is finally a bone in the heart that does not break
when we remember we are still part of each other,
the muscle of hope that goes on in the dark
pumping the blood that feeds us.
Under a sky the color of pea soup
she is looking at her work growing away there
actively, thickly like grapevines or pole beans
as things grow in the real world, slowly enough.
If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water,
if you provide birds that eat insects a home and winter food,
if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars,
if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees,
then the plants flourish, but at their own internal clock.